Tag: How to

In part one of this series I showed the finished version of photo-tagging script I’ve been using. I based my work (which is available for download) on James Brundage’s PSImageTools module for PowerShell which is part of the PowerPack included with the Windows 7 Resource kit (and downloadable independently). In this post I want to…

Arthur : “You mean you can see into my mind ?” Marvin: “Yes.” Arthur: “And … ?” Marvin: “It amazes me how you manage to live in anything that small” Looking back down the recent posts you might notice that this is the 8th in a row about my new phone (so it’s obviously made…

In my previous post I mentioned a correspondent – his name is Andy – who’d written asking the question “What the hell is the point of libraries and if you have the name of the person whose idea they were please post it for summary flaming” He made another comment which I think goes to…

There is a problem which comes up in several places in PowerShell – that is helping the user by being vague about parameter types. Consider these examples from my Hyper-V library for PowerShell 1. The user can specify a machine using a string which contains its name Save-VM London-DC or Save-VM *DC, or Save-VM London*,Paris*…

In the last could of “change you should make” posts I’ve talked about a couple of things which turn Functions from being the poor-relation of compiled Cmdlets (as they were in PowerShell V1) to first class citizens, under V2. Originally the term “Script Cmdlets” was used but now we call them “Advanced functions”. This is…

A few days back I wrote about PowerShell version 2’s ability to confirm whether it should be changing something. Since I was writing something which would some pretty drastic changes , supporting –WhatIf and –Confirm for almost no effort seems like a huge win. The next thing I wanted to cover was modules. I’ve written…

I have been working on some PowerShell recently to handle the initial setup of a new machine, and I wanted to add the activation. If you do this from a command line it usually using the Software Licence manager script (slMgr.vbs) but this is just a wrapper around a couple of WMI objects which are…

Long, long ago when I was using my first Microsoft product, I knew one way to get input from the user. The product was Commodore BASIC (in those days we wrote it in uppercase and knew it stood for Beginners All-purpose Symbol Instructional Code). and the method was INPUT. This was back in early 1979…

The last post I made talked about customizing windows image (.WIM) files, and the post before that talked about creating Virtual hard disk (.VHD) files. So the last step is to look at putting an image onto a VHD and making it bootable So the steps are Identify your WIM file and if it has…

In the initial release of Windows Server 2008 one of the the questions which always came up was “how do I add X” – the answer was we had tools named OCSETUP and OCLIST. These have been superseded in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 with the new Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool (DISM.EXE)….